Monday, November 5, 2012

Esther Williams

“The popular Andy Hardy series movies were MGM’s
tests for its promising stars such as Judy Garland, Lana Turner and
Donna Reed. If you didn’t make it in those pictures, you were never
heard from again.” - Esther Williams

We are so glad that Esther made it. She's such a breathtaking Bombshell.

By age 16, Los Angeles native Esther Williams had earned three national
championships in both the breaststroke and freestyle. She was the youngest of 5 children in her family.

While Esther was on the
1940 Olympic team headed for Tokyo when World War II intervened,
canceling the games – along with her hopes for the gold and
international fame.

In 1940 newspaper sports
reportage, swimmers were frequently lined up for cheesecake photos,
flashing big smiles and a lot of leg. It didn’t take long for
legendary showman Billy Rose to notice the photogenic champion. Rose
needed a female lead to star opposite Olympian and screen star Johnny
Weismuller in his San Francisco Aquacade review. Billy Rose invited Esther to audition and it was Weismuller (the original Tarzan) himself who picked Esther
out of a casting call of 75 other women.

The Broadway musical was called Aquacade
complete with hundreds of swimmers, divers, special effects and singing. Esther was featured as Aquabelle #1, performing choreographed duet
swims with Weismuller.

Rose explained that, “I want to
pivot everything around Williams. It is up to us to make this girl known
up and down the coast. With the possible exception of Eleanor HoIm (the
1936 Olympic swimmer who was also Rose’s wife), she’s the most
beautiful swimming champion in the history of aquatics.”

MGM
executives agreed and consequently offered her a
screen test with Clark Gable. Gable and he studio liked her, and signed her to a contract. She made her first film opposite Mickey Rooney in Andy Hardy’s Double Life in 1942.

“The popular Andy Hardy series movies were MGM’s
tests for its promising stars such as Judy Garland, Lana Turner and
Donna Reed. If you didn’t make it in those pictures, you were never
heard from again.” - Esther WilliamsThe
audience response to the athletic All-American girl was phenomenal and
put Esther's career into high profile. Whilst filming
Mr. Coed with Red Skelton, they changed the name of the movie to Bathing
Beauty and made Esther Williams the star, demoting Skelton to the
supporting lead.

Bathing
Beauty was Hollywood’s very first swimming movie with a
special 90-foot square, 20-foot deep pool built at Stage 30 on the
MGM lot. It even had hidden air hoses, hydraulic lifts and special
camera cranes for overhead shots.

“No
one had ever done a swimming movie before,” she explains, “so we just
made it up as we went along. I ad-libbed all my own underwater
movements.”

The
film’s elaborate water scenes were choreographed by Busby Berkeley – complete with smoke, flames, fountains and pretty girls swimming around
with bows in their hair. Bathing
Beauty was second only to Gone with the Wind as the most successful film
of 1944.

By the tail end of World War II, Esther
was a pinup favorite with returning Gl’s.

MGM’s publicity
mill kept churning out headlines and photo opportunities – she once
counted 14 magazines on a local newsstand featuring her picture on the
cover. Esther Williarns was America’s sweetheart for more than 18 years,
appearing in 26 movies from the early 1940′s to the end of the ’5Os,
all but the last few for MGM.

Esther didn't have many dry-land roles in such films as Take Me Out to the Ball
Game, it was the lavish water spectaculars that made her such a box-office draw and that was her trademark. Esther's movie
career played a major role in the promotion of competitive and
synchronized swimming, which she is credited with popularizing. As
International Swimming Hall of Fame literature explains, “If swimming
would make his daughter grow up to look like Esther Williams, then
father was willing to pay for the lessons.”

Movie making was very exhausting and Williams estimated that she swam
more than 1,000 miles while making those movies and was in the
water so many hours each day that she took naps with her legs on the
pool deck and her head floating in the water.

Williams
showed that she had a head for enterprise between those broad swimmer’s
shoulders. “I got into business because I knew those musicals couldn’t
go on forever. In fact, I was doing some department store modeling at
the time, and I told my bosses to hold my job. This movie-making thing
wouldn’t last. I mean, how many swimming movies could they make?”

Esther married
three times and had three children (Benjamin,
Kimball and Susan) during her second marriage to radio singer Ben Gage.

"I
don’t know to this day how I managed to fit into those bathing suits
when I was pregnant,” she said, “but I did.” She still refers to each
child by the movie she was making before they were born. “There I was,
diving off platforms with Ben in Neptune’s Daughter, going underwater in
silver lame’ with Kim in Pagan Love Song and learning how to water ski
with Susie in Easy to Love…and somehow I stayed a size 10 through it
all.”

When
someone came to her with the idea of putting her name on a line of
backyard swimming pools, she agreed. Twenty-five years later. “Esther
‘Williams is the most well-known name in the above-ground pool business
today.” says Jerry Herson of the Delair Group in new Jersey, the company
that actually manufactures the pools and sells them from California to
Maine. Then came licensing agreements with fashion swimwear
manufacturers that ultimately led to her own Esther Williams Collection
sold in department stores which targeted older women and based on the
retrospective look of her full-cut movie swimsuit designs.

“When I
go to business conventions for my products, it sometimes takes me over
four hours to sign all the autographs and pose for pictures,” she says.
“Everyone wants a photo for their store, and I never turn anyone down,
no matter how long it takes.”

Esther Williams
has had a full life, as an athlete, movie star, mother, businesswoman, spokesperson and an inspiration to millions.

“I think the joy that showed
through in my swimming movies comes from my lifelong love of the water,”
she explains. “No matter what I was doing, the best I felt all day was
when I was swimming.”

Then
there’s her relationship with her children, all three of whom she
taught to swim soon after birth. “One of the reasons I gave them this gift of swimming
so early in their lives was because I loved having them with me in the
water. And when I saw them take to it, it was a shared joy that we had
in common.

When asked
if she still swam, she laughed and said, “You know, I always get asked that. Of
course I still swim. I’ll go in later when I have the pool to myself.”